Business procedures have typically been automated using a business procedures processor running a model of the business process. This model is the workflow process. Recently, the extensible markup language (XML), which is a world wide web consortium (W3C) standard, has gained popularity for expressing business documents in a standardized format. Innovations such as Biz Talk™ from Microsoft® Corporation (One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Wash. 98052) have introduced the idea that a business workflow processor can orchestrate business transactions using the XML standard to accomplish document transfers in the course of daily business.
The processing of XML documents often requires opening up the document at various points in the processing and routing among organizations within an enterprise. Often, the same information is checked when a document is opened. For example, if a purchase order is being routed in an enterprise between different departments, the total amount of the purchase order may be checked repeatedly or may be updated based on authorization limits. Additionally, the total dollar amount may vary as various departments add or subtract line items and quantities on the purchase order. In this instance, the purchase order must be opened, searched for the total dollar amount information, information retrieved, and then closed by nearly every department in the enterprise. The repeated access of the same data from the document can be performed more efficiently if a mechanism for accessing the data without opening the document were available.
A second inefficiency in the processing of documents in a business procedure automation environment is the correlation of messages. Documents may be viewed as messages that are passed from one department to another. Eventually, the messages may be transferred out of the enterprise environment. For example, a purchase order for supplies may be generated within a business environment and be sent to some external vendor fill the purchase order. Eventually, a confirmation message may be returned. However, there is currently no standardized method to automatically correlate the confirmation message with any previously processed or internally routed message. A content examination may be required to manually determine the correspondence of one message to another. This inefficiency could be avoided if there was a mechanism to correlate messages in an automated business processing environment.
Thus, there is a need for a method and system which would allow selected message information which is accessed repeatedly to be available to a message processor. Additionally, it would be useful if the message processor could correlate new messages with existing ones in an enterprise environment. The present invention addresses the aforementioned needs and solves them with additional advantages as expressed herein.